************************************************The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

Al Gore had some wonderfully powerful words to say about climate change in his 2007 Nobel Peace Prize lecture yesterday in Oslo. “The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask, ‘What were you thinking; why didn’t you act?’ Or they will ask instead, ‘How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?’”

And if you find those words just a little too sentimental, think about the cost per watt these days for your business.

Today we have news in the benchmarking world that we have been waiting for, for quite some time. Today, SPEC announced the exciting new SPECpower benchmark, called SPECpower_ssj2008, which measures both performance and power.

IBM helped develop this benchmark, an excellent first step in understanding the relationship between systems performance and energy use. IBM looks forward to continued work to create benchmarks that broaden the spectrum of environments represented by this benchmark and to ensure that the data shown is representative of the many computing environments that exist, such as those employing server consolidation and virtualization.

In addition to this exciting new benchmark, there is a host of IBM energy-related IT resources available now. For now is the time, Mr. Gore said, “to make peace with the planet.”

************************************************The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

SPEC and the SPEC benchmark names are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.

Just yesterday, I heard the greatest summer camp story. Camps have just added a new item to their list of what is not allowed at camp. No drinking, no guns, no illegal substances, and no bad words, of course. But something completely new is now banned for the summer of 2007. . . the two words - "Harry Potter." One kid I heard about even got into serious trouble while telling a fellow camper that "Harry Potter is a wizard."

Another great story for the summer of 2007 is again about POWER6 benchmarks. Earlier this week, an exciting POWER6 SAP BI Data Mart benchmark was published for IBM System i. This latest result demonstrates the outstanding performance gains that can be achieved with POWER6 technology and builds on System i leadership in the SAP BW Benchmark. The new POWER6 System i 570 4-core measurement is 78.7% better than the previous 4-core result on the i5-570. (1)

This new benchmark from SAP focuses on query performance in a Data Mart environment. The data mart scenario is one use of the Business Intelligence capabilities of SAP NetWeaver. The data mart contains a static snapshot of operational data. Multiple users run queries on this data in an SD InfoCube which contains 2,500,000,000 records.

The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

SAP, mySAP and other SAP product and service names mentioned herein as well as their respectivelogos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries allover the world.

Our new Garmin GPS fits in the palm of your hand and is named Amber. She tells you where to go and exactly how to get there. She has a clear and enticing voice, except when you go the wrong way and she tells you she is "recalculating."

And earlier this week on my vacation, she missed the parking lot for the hiking trail by several miles. And I was pissed. A waste of gas, a waste of time. Plus now there existed the possibility of coming off the mountain in the dark.

As we drove slowly back to the trail head, I happened to notice an incredible waterfall you could swim in with a natural water slide. That could only be seen by driving on that side of the road. That could only have been seen by being sent too far and having to return.

After climbing a 3500 foot mountain in 90 degree heat, swimming in that waterfall later in the day was heaven. Thank you, Amber. I don't even get annoyed anymore when you scold me about "recalculating."

************************************************The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

When you've been around awhile, you think you've seen everything. Or so I thought until yesterday.

Yesterday I was at my neighborhood hair salon and noticed a new product on the shelves. Next to the avocado shampoos and jujuba conditioners was a new hair product that actually was supposed to make your hair feel and smell the way it does right after you come out after swimming in the ocean. Yes, that horrible feeling of salt and sea air in your hair can now be had directly from a small expensive bottle made in New York City.

And that was exactly how I felt when I saw Sun and Fujitsu's press release this morning announcing their new entry-level server, the SPARC Enterprise M3000. The only real benchmark claim reads "The SPARC Enterprise M3000 server leverages the same quad-core SPARC64 VII processor used in the world-record holding SPARC Enterprise M4000, M5000, M8000 and M9000 servers."

I guess we are supposed to assume that if I have a friend who has a friend who was in the Olympics once . . . Guys, that disease actually has a name and it's called the fallacy of honor by association.

I guess it will be a long time before I really see everything there is to see.

************************************************The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

OK, I admit it. I had thought about it. What if I created a whole new id for myself called benchmark superstar. It would of course be anonymous. No links to IBM, no links to who I am, totally anonymous. What if I then posted incredibly acidic comments on Sun's blogs with this new id every time I saw something that I didn't like. What if I then posted comments to my own blog about how wonderful my blogs are and how wonderful my hair looks.

Sun's recent benchmarking blog entry presents a LINPACK result that they claim "beats" IBM's POWER6 result. The fact is that Sun's system is actually TWICE as big and surpasses the IBM System p 570 by only 12%.(1)

A reader named John set the facts straight in the comments. "John" does a great job highlighting IBM's leadership result but also makes sure to tell us that he has a data center with all sorts of hardware from different vendors. And that's good because then we can believe that his wife's name is not really Nhoj.

The most exciting news today is the publishing of the TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers. IBM again leads in the TOP500 with the most installed aggregate throughput, the most systems in the TOP10, TOP50 and TOP100. The fastest machine in Europe, the most energy-efficient system, the most energy-efficient x86 cluster. In fact, IBM had 18 of the 20 most energy-efficient systems.

It's no wonder that Oracle would publish a press release today that has nothing to do with the TOP500. Oracle has just published a press release touting an SAP Business Intelligence "world record" benchmark result.

Here's what you need to know:

Oracle has chosen an older simpler SAP BI benchmark rather than the more sophisticated SAP BI-MXL benchmark that IBM has published outstanding POWER7 results on.

Oracle's new result is on a Fujitsu system.

Oracle compares their brand new result with an IBM result from almost two years ago that had 8 times fewer cores and used older technology.(1)

Oh, and in the TOP500 today, IBM had the most systems with 198. HP had 185. Cray had 21. And Oracle/Sun. They had 12.

The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

SAP, mySAP and other SAP product and service names mentioned herein as well as their respective
logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries all
over the world.

Yesterday, Sun published a new SAP 2-tier SD result on the Sun SPARC Enterprise Model T2000. The Sun result achieved 68% less performance than the IBM System x3650. And of course, the top SAP SD 2-tier 8-core result is on the POWER6 IBM System p 570.(1)

The colored pencils and the shower caddy will have to wait for next time.

The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

SAP, mySAP and other SAP product and service names mentioned herein as well as their respectivelogos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries allover the world.

One of the latest trends I have seen making a comeback in teaching has been the concept of having the student grade themselves. This method can be enlightening and innovative or not, depending on the integrity of the student and the type of assignment.

HP claims a price/performance increase with new Itanium technology, backed up by a benchmark footnote. Great. But the problem here is that the benchmark wasn't SPEC. It wasn't TPC. It wasn't SAP. It wasn't even Notesbench. The benchmark was an internal HP order entry benchmark. With no details.

If you give yourself an "A" it's nice to know why.

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The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

SAP, mySAP and other SAP product and service names mentioned herein as well as their respectivelogos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries allover the world.

SPEC and the SPEC benchmark names are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.

Today IBM announced the IBM System z10 Enterprise Class mainframe, the cornerstone of the New Enterprise Data Center, a highly efficient and dynamic roadmap that addresses the business challenges of today and the future. The z10 significantly increases performance and reduces power, cooling costs, and floor space requirements.

Back to the future, with IBM's New Enterprise Data Center and the IBM System z10. "Where we're going we don't need roads."

************************************************The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

You'd have to be a hermit not to realize that things are getting tougher economically for many of us. Energy prices and mortgages are skyrocketing. Trips to the mall are a luxury. Staycations have replaced vacations.

And that's why it was a pleasant surprise to see something recently that actually went down in price. An IBM TPC-C result from October was revised last week ---- the change being that price decreased from $2.56/tpmC to $2.43/tpmC.(1) Mostly because of savings on IBM storage.

Better price performance, more value for the dollar. Great news. But make sure to note that the decrease was certainly not attributable to the recent increase in Oracle pricing, which did make it tough for some benchmark repricing.

Sun's latest press release announced SAP SD 2-tier benchmark results for the new Sun Fire X4640, a hex-core AMD Opteron system. They compared this system of 8 processor chips, 48 cores, and 48 threads directly to an IBM Power system with only 8 cores. The Sun system also was configured with 256 GB main memory, while the Power system only had 64 GB. So 6 times the cores and 4 times the memory to get only "2.7x the performance." (1)

Sometimes benchmark press releases remind me of the couple who crashed the White House party last month. Or Tiger.

The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

SAP, mySAP and other SAP product and service names mentioned herein as well as their respective
logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries all
over the world.

Welcome to my new benchmarking blog on IBM Developerworks ! So today is my first blog entry. I was told that it would take a long time to set up the blog and I had visions of being able to talk about the Ides of March or St. Patrick's Day or maybe even April Fool's Day - but I guess that isn't happening because for once something happened sooner than promised and so here I am in the beginning of a cold and snowy March in Cleveland . . .

So what will I be talking about in this blog ? I will be discussing industry standard and ISV benchmarking and systems performance. Look for my thoughts on IBM, Sun, HP, and others. I know a lot about these areas - what I don't know so much about is blogging. So I went to my wonderful peer blogger on storage who gave me some outstanding pointers on what to do and more importantly what not to do. He has only gotten in trouble once. He did recommend a very cool book on blogging called "Naked Conversations" by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey, 2006). Now when I went to take this book out of our local library, the woman at the desk did indeed take a look at the title and then looked at me. It is a very exciting read, maybe not quite as exciting as the title, but really explains how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers. It has a lot of interesting case studies on blog successes as well as how to do it right and how not to do it.

While I was at the library, I also checked out and read another great business book called "The Power of Nice" by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval (Doubleday, New York, New York, 2006). Jay Leno and Donald Trump are even in this book. More people in the world need to read this book. I tried out a compliment that was featured in the book this morning on a colleague and boy did it work wonders. Unfortunately I may not be able to be so nice in this blog, especially when I have to read other not so nice blogs like Sun's BM Seer blog.

Note that the standard IBM disclaimer applies to this blog : “The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.”